Know Your Customer (KYC) typically refers to the activities of customer-related due diligence that financial institutions and other regulated companies (including e-payment companies) perform to identify their clients and ascertain relevant information pertinent to doing financial business (including supporting online payments) with them, and to the regulations that govern those activities. In the USA, KYC typically is a policy and process implemented to conform to a customer identification program (CIP) mandated under the Bank Secrecy Act and USA PATRIOT Act. While KYC is described herein in a statutory and regulatory framework to illustrate aspects of the present technology, embodiments of the technology can be applied outside the statutory and regulatory framework. More generally, embodiments of the disclosed technology can find application to identity verification in other than the KYC context.
A KYC program typically may include: collection of identity information such as first name, last name, address, social security number (SSN) (or other applicable identification number), and phone number; verification of the collected KYC data; risk determination (e.g., of the risk of money laundering or identity theft associated with the customer); creation of an expectation of a customer's transactional behavior; and monitoring of a customer's transactions against their expected behavior and recorded profile as well as that of the customer's peers.